Female flânerie and coming of age: Henri Decoin’s Abus de confiance (1937)

Abstract

During the 1930s Danielle Darrieux emerges as a distinctly ‘mobile’ star and inhabits urban space in a more modern and itinerant fashion than other female stars of the 1930s, both in terms of the characters she plays (student, orphan, lawyer) and the city spaces in which she is represented. The film Abus de confiance/Abused Confidence (Henri Decoin, 1937) stages the importance of the city experience in a young woman’s coming of age in 1930s Paris, inviting spectators to journey through Paris from a young woman’s point of view. One the film’s most striking features is the nearly eight-minute scene during which Lydia (Darrieux) embarks on a night-time walk through the streets of Paris to reflect on the troubling events of her recent past. As a flâneuse, Lydia appropriates what Friedberg calls the ‘mobile gaze’, endowing her with spatial mobility that is challenged at different points in the narrative by male characters who serve as threatening obstacles to her journey through Paris. One of the rare films of the 1930s to feature female flânerie, Abus de confiance is a social critique that brings together discourse on wayward interwar youth culture and concerns about the mobility associated with the modern woman emblematized by Darrieux’s stardom.